The Emmy-winning ABC comedy Modern Family features a gay couple with an adopted child, but the show has refused to directly explore the issue of same sex marriage.
That changed Wednesday night during the show’s fifth season premiere.
Cam and Mitchell, the gay couple played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet, got engaged in a plot that incorporated California’s recent decision to allow gay marriages.
So why would the show incorporate a story line that could prove divisive to some viewers? Show writer Jeffrey Richman, who is gay, shared his rationale with The Hollywood Reporter.
We hadn’t really talked about Mitch and Cam getting married until DOMA and Prop 8 came onto our radar when we got back to work in the middle of May. We don’t usually do California-centric stories — and while we don’t really identify where the characters live, we knew we weren’t going to send them to another state to get married and they weren’t going to have a fake commitment ceremony. We’d avoided that for four seasons. Mitch and Cam have been in a relationship for eight years, they already are a family and they have a daughter, so there needed to be a reason for them to get married. This became the “why now.
Richman also says viewers can expect the theme to expand in the weeks to come.
You could see a bachelor party, you could see a party planner, you could see so many things.